Your Rights To Privacy When Using Technology Are A Huge Unknown

As the Senate debates this week whether police need a warrant to
search your email, the national spotlight has swung to the
disorganized way courts across the country handle your rights
when it comes to technology.

While cellphone carriers seem to have no problem giving up
information on subscribers' text messages and other data —
carriers said they responded in 2011 to
1.3 million demands for information from law enforcement —
the courts remain divided about whether cops
can actually access your phone without a warrant, The New York Times reported Sunday.

A judge in Rhode Island recently threw out cellphone evidence
linking a man to a child's murder since the police didn't have a
warrant for the records. But a federal appeals court in Louisiana
is debating whether smartphone records belong to the user, and
thus deserve protection, or belong to the phone company.

Courts in Ohio have ruled police need warrants to search
cellphones but California's highest court has said cops can
search a suspect's phone at the time of arrest without a warrant,
according to the Times.

“The courts are all over the place,” Hanni Fakhoury, a criminal
lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation told the Times.
“They can’t even agree if there’s a reasonable expectation of
privacy in text messages that would trigger Fourth Amendment
protection.”

But while courts debate cellphone data, the Pittsburgh ruling
about Internet privacy is ironclad.

U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti ruled Internet subscribers,
especially those stealing Internet, do "not have an expectation
of privacy in that connection."

But that raises the question, if it's so clear Internet usage
isn't protected, why are cellphones any different?

An internet subscriber does not have a reasonable expectation of
privacy in his IP address or the information he provides to
his Internet Service Provider, such as Comcast, in order to
legally establish an internet connection, and likewise, a person
connecting to another person’s wireless router does not have an
expectation of privacy in that connection,” U.S. District Judge
Joy Flowers Conti said of the Pittsburgh case.